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April 29, 2007

Sunlight
poured through our front door’s stained-glass window, splashing the floor with
an impressionistic rainbow. My two large
suitcases sat at the ready; everything I needed for the next few months was in
them, plus various sizes of clothes for Lexy to grow into. I stood there, stunned by the reality of what
was happening; I was really doing it: I
was leaving my husband. Stood there, in
this moment that felt too heavy and too long, torn between letting my baby
daughter finish her morning nap, and waking her up and leaving.

I
decided I should wake her or we could miss our plane. And, truthfully, I was afraid of another
fight with Bobby. Our arguments at this
point were just filler; we had been through this for months already and nothing
had changed. But before I reached the
bottom of the staircase I heard his footsteps, steady echoes from the direction
of the kitchen, and I turned to face him.

“What’s
this?” he asked.

“I
can’t anymore.”

There
he was, my handsome husband—sandy-brown hair still unbrushed from bed, plaid
pajama bottoms and an old T-shirt advertising a dentist in Oregon, ocean-blue
eyes searching my face—stricken that I was making good on my threat to leave
him. There was a smudge of newsprint ink
on his cheek; he had been reading in the kitchen. I wanted to cry, but didn’t. Bobby was the love of my life and even now,
in the middle of this stalemate, I wanted to move in his direction. I wanted his hands on my skin and my nose in
his neck and his breath in my ear. But
he was having an affair with some woman who was just delirious over him; he was
wining her and dining her and gifting her in a romantic torrent he had not
afforded me during our brief
courtship. All on our joint credit card,
making it so obvious he might as well have brought her home to dinner. He’d denied the affair; disavowed all the
unimaginative charges (books of poetry, flowers, candy; not an original gesture
on the list, but even so…). I had wanted
to believe him—I tried—but if it
wasn’t true then why had the charges started up again on our new cards even
after we’d cancelled the old ones? And
why had she written to him again,
just today?

“Annie,
please.” He stepped toward me; but I shook my head.

“I
want you to read something.” I opened my
purse, balanced atop one of the suitcases, withdrew the e-mail I’d printed out
that morning and handed it to him. He
disliked computers and rarely checked his e-mail himself; lately, since all
this had started, I had taken to checking it for him.

I watched
him, now standing in the colorful puddle of light, as he read the letter. It was without a doubt the most painful one
yet, describing his body in accurate detail: the way his collarbones seemed to spread like wings when he was above
you, making love. The first time I’d
read it, seeing him over her brought such crisp pain I’d had to
lift my eyes off the page. By the third
and fourth readings, I was stoic; and by the fifth, in my imagination, I saw
him fly away. She began the e-mail using
his childhood nickname, Bobbybob, and
ended it with a flourish of intimacy that nonetheless concealed her name: Lovyluv.

His
hand, and the letter, fell to his side. “I’ve told you so many times: I
don’t know who’s sending these.”

“I never thought you’d lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

“So all those love letters are fictitious?”

“Annie, please—”

“And
all those credit card charges?”

“Why
won’t you believe me?”

“I’ve
been wanting to ask you,” I said, “and please tell the truth: Would you have even married me if I hadn’t gotten
pregnant?”

“This
is exhausting, Annie.”

“It
would help me to know.”

“I
didn’t marry you because you were pregnant, I married you because I love you;
the pregnancy just sped things up.” He
stepped toward me and reached for my arm, saying, “Don’t go.”

Reflexively,
I moved away; and tripping over the nearest suitcase I fell against the
door. My sweater-clad elbow pressed into
the bottom edge of the stained glass and the first thing I thought was how soft
it was as the lead seams bowed under pressure. The next thought: Who would know
how to fix such a window? I regained my
balance and stepped away from the door. Fixing it wasn’t my problem anymore. I was leaving.

“What
about Kent?” he asked. “When are you going to tell him?”

Outside,
a bird sang a sudden, tremulous spring song. I kept my voice low and steady because I knew this information would
convince him I was serious: “Bobby, I
already quit; I called Kent this morning at home. I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I have another job lined up in New York.”

His
face, already pale from last winter, went ashen. Bobby was nineteen years into his career as a
physical therapist in the U.S. Public Health Service; in one year, he could
retire with bounteous lifelong benefits. Me, I was just two years in and I didn’t care anymore. After Lexy was born I’d had only six weeks
off before jumping back on track, and our workday at the prison began at seven a.m. I didn’t want
to drop my baby off at daycare in the pitch dark morning ever again.

“Annie,
don’t leave me.” The strain in his
voice, the regret, the yearning, was
painful to hear. “I’ll find a way to
show you you’re wrong.”

Then show me! But I didn’t say it because that plea had
been my mantra and yet—nothing. I was
finished waiting; this latest e-mail was the last straw. Lately I’d wondered if he had met her while I
was still pregnant with Lexy, toward the end when we weren’t having sex
anymore. Julie, my twin sister, had told
me that’s just what happened to a friend of hers: a loving marriage, a wanted baby, and then
the husband couldn’t tolerate a couple months of abstinence and he
“roamed.” Like he was a cow who’d
wandered through a broken fence. I’d
never thought Bobby could do such a thing. Never. Julie’s friend hadn’t, either; but then you
never do.

“I’m
going to wake her,” I said, “or we’ll miss our flight.”

“Where
are you going?”

“To
Julie’s.”

His
face seemed to clamp at the mention of her name; no surprise to me: I’d always figured that, deep down, he was
jealous of the closeness I shared with my twin.

As I
walked toward the stairs, he followed me. “Annie, please—please don’t
take Lexy away from me.”

“I’m
sorry,” I said. And I was. Sorry. Sad. Out of rationalizations. Finished with begging for what he couldn’t
seem to give me: the simple truth, and
an end to the affair.

I
went upstairs to get Lexy. Quiet
footsteps on the pale carpet Bobby and I had chosen together, an impractical
but beautiful shade of champagne. He
would be lonely by himself in this house. (Would he bring her
here?) I could feel its emptiness and I
wasn’t even gone yet; I was still here, Lexy was still asleep in her very own
crib, I could still change my mind, we could stay, we could stay….

Lexy’s
bedroom doorknob was cool in my hand. It
clicked when I turned it.

Morning
light edged the pulled-down window shades, creating a silvery
half-darkness. Lexy’s breaths were long
and deep and her room smelled baby-sweet. It was a good sized room, with butter-yellow walls trimmed in
white. Two built-in corner bookcases
held whatever things she had collected in the five months of her life. Dolls, books, colorful objects that made all
kinds of sounds when you moved them.

On a
high shelf of one bookcase was the collection of tiny hand-blown glass cats and
kittens from the summer my parents took us to Italy, when Julie and I were seven. It was the July before they got divorced, a
final and typically dramatic try at making their marriage work. It was a fun summer, though; Julie and I
played happily beneath marital thunder clouds inside the ancient stone walls
surrounding the Florentine rental castle where we stayed for four whole
weeks. We were the kind of kids who
didn’t worry about things unless we had to, believing that our twin-bond
protected us from hazard (we may have actually still believed this, now, at the
age of thirty-three). Being together
always felt like safety in a storm.

The
way our parents finally broke the news was this: Dad left the house, and Mom sat us down in the living room (we were still
in our matching pink nightgowns; the new school year hadn’t yet started) and
said in her cheerful way, “Daddy and I have decided that enough is enough. There won’t be any more fighting.”

Their
divorce was final before Christmas. Under the tree that year my mother wrapped my glass cats in purple
tissue paper with a green ribbon. Julie’s cats were wrapped in green paper with purple ribbon. We had watched the glass blower make the tiny
cats and even tinier kittens but never knew our parents had gone back to buy
them for us.

Now
I wrapped my glass cats in tissues and eased the soft square into my sweater’s
pocket. Well, Julie’s sweater; she had
forgotten it here on her last visit in March and I was wearing it to return to
her tonight. (It was a wonderful
sweater, an expensive Oilily with pink and orange flowers shifting dominance
depending on the angle of the light, creating a hallucinogenic effect. It reminded me of the old Cheerios boxes
Julie and I would stare at during childhood breakfasts, shifting our gazes to
catch another invisible, floating O.) I
noticed that one of the sweater’s six large, distinctive flower-shaped buttons
had fallen off—and for a moment I panicked. But I had no time to search for a button now.

Lexy
was asleep on her stomach even though I’d left her on her back; she had only
recently started turning over. I ran my
hand lightly down her back to let her body know Mommy was there, then carefully
picked her up and positioned her over my shoulder so she could keep
sleeping. Her eyes fluttered open then
fell shut again. I detoured to my
bedroom for one more glance to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and
discovered that I had: the novel I was
in the middle of reading. The Talented Mr. Ripley had been keeping
me up nights, distracting me from my troubles, and I needed to finish it. Steadying Lexy, I dipped at the knee and took
the slender paperback in my free hand.

Downstairs,
I transferred Lexy to Bobby’s shoulder so he could hold her while I put the
suitcases into the trunk of the car. I
figured I owed him that. At first he
wouldn’t follow me outside into the bright morning, instead staying in the
front hall with our baby sleeping floppily over his shoulder. It was the week our cherry tree was in full
bloom, with a few pink petals on the dappled shadows of our front lawn, and I
got the feeling the perfect beauty of the tree and the clear sunlight would
pain him more than he could handle at the moment. I did feel sorry for him. But I had to go.

“Okay,”
I whispered. “I’ll take her now.”

He
didn’t move. I could see him drinking
her in, smelling her, feeling her. I
gave him another moment before slipping my hands under her arms and shifting
her back to my shoulder. This time she
woke up. She took a deep yawn and
settled her weight into me.

“I’ll
park in Long Term and leave the ticket under the mat so you can get the car,” I
said.

“How
will I get to the airport to get the car and then drive it back? I’m just one person.” His eyes teared up and for the first time I
saw a fleck of gray in his left eyebrow, just one lone hair. In the past months he had sprouted silver at
his temples and his face had become a fretful map. He had twelve years on me and he would grow
old first. I’d always known that and it
had never bothered me. I wondered now if
his affair was some kind of mid-life crisis. Was that what this was?

“Oh,
Bobby. You’ll figure it out. Ask someone to go with you.”

He
knew who I meant. Her. The mystery woman. Lovyluv.

“You’re
making a real mistake,” he said. “This
is a marriage. We have a child.”

But
I still believed that if he really wasn’t having an affair, if the love letters
and credit card charges were really part of some hoax, he would have found a
way to prove it. I kept hoping he would. Even up to the last minute, after I’d
strapped Lexy into her car seat, my heart was primed…but all he could do as I
got into the car was turn around and walk back into the house. He kept his eyes down, on the flagstone path,
refusing to even glance at the cherry tree. I drove away. In the rear view
mirror I could see his chest rising and falling.

He
was weeping, I was weeping.

He
shut the door.

I
turned the corner off our street and began the long day’s journey from our home
in Lexington, Kentucky to my sister’s house in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.

It
was five
o’clock when I carried my
restless baby off the plane at Albany InternationalAirport. I changed her
diaper in the ladies room, brushed my hair and refreshed my pale pink lipstick
(usually the only makeup I wore, an irrational yet effective source of
confidence; the putting-on-of-lipstick in a mirror was something we had often
watched our mother do: the stretched
lips, the steady eye, the smooth stroke of color). Then I gathered our bags and sat for twenty
minutes to nurse her. My cell phone
service had no network this far east so I had to find a working pay phone to
let Julie know we’d landed on time.

“Expect
us by seven. And Julie, don’t hold
dinner.”

“I
never eat before seven, anyway.”

Having
grown accustomed to late-afternoon dinners (Bobby and I were in bed by
eight-thirty to be up at five, daycare at six-thirty, work by seven) I had
forgotten how skewed my hours had become. Before Kentucky and Bobby and Lexy and the good ‘ol Public Health
Service, I too used to eat dinner at seven, eight, even nine o’clock.

“I’ll
have to nurse Lexy as soon as I get there and throw her into bed, so just eat
when you’re hungry. Did you get the—”

“Crib’s
all set up. I got the cutest
sheets. You’ll see.”

I
had asked her to rent a crib for the summer but Julie being Julie (she was a
successful independent marketing consultant, apparently some kind of
sought-after guru), she had gone out and bought one.

“Did
you—”

“Yes, Annie, I washed the sheets
first. Just get in the car and be here, okay?”

By
the time we picked up the rental car, Lexy had had enough of traveling and she
didn’t want to get into the car seat; she wanted to roll around the floor and
practice grabbing for toys.

“Just
a little longer, sweet baby. Promise.”

I
ran my hand over her peachy wisps of hair; kissed her forehead, both cheeks,
her dimpled chin, her button nose. She
laughed, then immediately cried. Her
little face screwing up so suddenly brought me to tears. I had felt like crying for hours but hadn’t
wanted to attract attention to myself on the plane. All day I had felt that everyone could see me
for what I really was: a wife who had
left her husband; a mother who had taken a child from a father; a woman who had
lost hope in a man. Did it show? I knew that from now on, when people
mentioned the Goodmans, it would be with the tag line “that broken
family.” I was Anais (Annie)
Milliken-Goodman. (Anna-ees: the French
pronunciation. Naming us Anais and
Juliet had been a flight of fancy in the romantic early years of our parents’
marriage.) Would I drop Goodman from my
name? Slice off the dangling
hyphen? Go back to square one? If I did, then Lexy and I would officially be
Alexis Goodman and Anais Milliken. But I
had always wanted to share a last name with my child. Maybe we could drop our last names all
together; she could be just Lexy and I could be just Annie. We could start a band. A sob ratcheted up my throat and escaped as a
shout. I felt like such a fool. What had I done?

A
headache blossomed as the little blue car’s engine leapt into gear. The jolt quieted Lexy and I felt guiltily
indebted to the sudden, unnerving grind of noise. Poor baby. What did she make of all this? Did she know something momentous was happening today? That the day was a knife carving a groove in
our lives between before and after? Maybe I was wrong but I sensed she felt the cut, the separation, as
deeply as I did.

Why
had Bobby done it? Why hadn’t I been
enough for him? There was a time I would
have bet my soul that he and I were made for each other. With him, I had felt almost as right as I did
with my identical twin: one person,
joined in separate bodies.

I
switched on the radio and we listened to classical music as we drove out of Albany toward the New York-Massachusetts border. When Lexy sighed, deep and long, I felt
myself relax a notch. In the rear view
mirror I saw she had fallen asleep and I whispered “thank you” to the
windshield. Humming along the highway,
we consumed the miles to Great Barrington. To Julie’s. I had never been to
her new house but I felt I was going home. I was as eager to arrive as I had ever been
to get anywhere. Home after work. Bed after a tiring day. Birth after labor. Love after loneliness. Resolution after doubt.

After
weeks of agony, I had a made a decision. I couldn’t just stay there, living with Bobby, sleeping with him,
working side by side, wondering who she
was. I couldn’t agree that black was
white or white was black when all I saw were shades of gray. I would not
repeat my mother’s mistake, accepting my father’s lies for years until finally
it turned out her suspicions had been correct: he was cheating. It was terrible
watching her struggle to recover from her own self-deceptions, her willingness
to believe his lies; though in the end she never did recover—cancer got her first. We were only ten when our mother died, leaving me with the conviction
that a woman should never compromise on the truth. At twelve, when our father died suddenly in a
car accident, I learned that nothing was permanent or real except what you felt
in your heart. You had to create your
own reality, believe in it and it would make you strong. The old maxim that time is too precious to waste became a vivid reminder to always
take action when I was sure of something.

Until
Bobby could tell me the truth, there was no going back.

Driving,
I thought of something Julie had once said to me, about how she and I were as
close as any two people could possibly be. Closer. How even marriage could
not compare. It was my wedding day, a
cool May afternoon in Kentucky and I was two months pregnant. (Almost exactly one year ago; Bobby and I had
not even made our first anniversary.) The night before, she had tried on my wedding dress and it was loose on
her. I was already plumping up but not
showing yet; for the first time ever, we were not exactly the same size. Standing there in my dress, waiting for my
music cue to walk the aisle, she put her hand on my belly and repeated,
“Closer.”

My
wedding day. Our first. Julie’s engagement had broken up two years
ago, dropping her back into a dating scene that felt more ruthlessly
competitive the older you got. When I became pregnant and Bobby and I decided
to marry, Julie shared our happiness. She knew, in the deep unspoken
way of twins, how in love with Bobby I was. (Though now, looking back, I wondered if he was already seeing her.) In the end only motherhood could compare to the absolute connection
Julie and I shared. Romantic love was
intoxicating. Toxic. I felt sorry for people who didn’t have a
twin with whom to entwine when life weakened you; on whose fibers of love and
shared memory you could always strengthen yourself. I decided I was not eligible for self-pity, even
today, because I had a daughter and a
twin sister. Julie and I had clung
together through every twist and turn of our lives, ultimately raising each
other—at the shoddy Long Island boarding school where our misguided guardian
Aunt Pru had placed us immediately after our father’s funeral, in the sleepaway
camps where she had sent us for two months every summer, and during the single
dull week we spent with her annually in California. We had survived all that. I would survive this.

When
we finally crossed the border between New York and Massachusetts, we had been on the road for over two hours, not the
fifty-seven minutes predicted by the global positioning system suction-cupped
to the windshield. Somehow, despite the
GPS, I had managed to get lost twice. And a detour to nurse Lexy and change her diaper had inflated into a
dinner stop when I realized how hungry I was. By the time we turned the car onto Division Street, Julie’s street, a gentle country twilight had eased
into that deep purple just before the sky went black. It was almost eight p.m. My body was
screaming for sleep and Lexy was just…screaming.

Julie
had explained to me that the barn she had bought last year and renovated
through the winter was at the crossroads of Division Street and Alford Road. She said it
was painted red and would be impossible to miss. Division Street was long and winding and
dark, just what you would expect of a country road at night. But then gradually the darkness began to
fade. It was like someone had spilled
light all over the street, light that spread toward me. Washed over me like a wave, even filled the
car. Like the car’s starting jolt back
at the airport, the brightness of this light quieted Lexy. Her wailing voice simply stopped as we pulled
into the flashing arcs of white and blue and red lights.

Police
lights.

I
felt a sinking inside me, a terrible dread, as I pulled up behind the last of
three squad cars parked in front of a big red barn. There was an ambulance. A series of disembodied camera flashes. A stout man wearing a Red Sox baseball cap
wrapping yellow police tape around the trunk of a tree, trailing it in search
of another anchor. This close, the
rotating police lights blinded us each time they swept over our car.